Julian Assange says that he was in “indirect” contact with ex-CIA staffer Edward Snowden, who leaked details of US top-secret Internet snooping programs, and that the whistleblower stood for the same goals as the WikiLeaks organization.

“What [Snowden] has revealed is what I have been speaking
about for years, that the [US] National Security Agency and its
allies have been involved in a mass interception program of
Google, Facebook, the various telecommunications data…,”
Assange stated in an interview with Australian news program
Lateline on ABC.

Snowden, 29, is behind one of the biggest leaks in US
political history. He revealed to The Guardian top-secret
documents including those about the US National Security Agency’s
(NSA) massive spy tool, the PRISM. It gives US intelligence
agencies access to data servers maintained by some of the
country’s biggest Internet companies – and therefore an ability
to spy on Americans’ emails, video chats, search history, and so
on.

Assange – who has been holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in the
UK and is running for a seat in the Australian senate later this
year – approved of Snowden’s actions calling him “a hero who
has informed the public about one of the most serious events of
the decade, which is the creeping formulation of a mass
surveillance state”.

He added that the WikiLeaks political party shares a similar
stance on warrantless spying, seeing it as
“unacceptable.”

“We run the danger here of the West more broadly drifting into
a state where there are two systems. There's one law for the
average person and there's another law if you're inside the
national intelligence complex,” he said. “You can
intercept whoever you want, you're completely unaccountable for
your actions, there's no judicial review.”

The disclosure of the two massive secret US surveillance programs
– the PRISM and also a program under which a division of
telecommunications provider Verizon was ordered to hand over
records to the NSA – caused huge public uproar. American
intelligence confirmed that they collect the private messages of
millions of Internet users, but insist that the mass surveillance
only targeted “non-US persons outside the
US”.

President Barack Obama said last Friday that the NSA program is justified as it allows agents
to identify “leads with respect to folks who might engage in
terrorism” and noted that one “can’t have 100 per cent
security and also then have 100 per cent privacy.”

However, American tech giants – Google and FaceBook – continued
to deny that they knew about the PRISM program.